<p>Sentence completions are a pain for me. For math there are shortcuts and formulas to use, for indentifying errors there are things to look for to solve it. But for Sentence completions the strategies are limited. I know they are things to look for such as if the word is postive or negative and such, but they are still hard.</p>
<p>My weakest subject is english because of vocabulary. I've always struggled with retain words I should know. </p>
<p>How can I improve my vocab and get better at sentence completions? If there is a book of SAT words I should get which one because there are like 10 billion different ones!</p>
<p>i'm just practicing lots of CR and write down the words that i dont know. but before looking up in the dictionary, try to guess their defintion.</p>
<p>I know they are things to look for such as if the word is postive or negative and such, but they are still hard.</p>
<p>How is this not working for you? On almost every problem you should AT LEAST get it down to two answers, if not find the answer just with +/-. From there it's just logic.</p>
<p>But I guess if you're still having problems just do what everyone else said.</p>
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On almost every problem you should AT LEAST get it down to two answers
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<p>yeah well thats usually the problem, i dont know about the OP but for me its almost ALWAYS down to two answers and i end up picking the wrong one.....</p>
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its almost ALWAYS down to two answers and i end up picking the wrong one.....
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<p>then i'd havto say that you are at that point where you just have to study words words words and memorize vocab until you eliminate the chance that "luck" will affect your score on sentence completitions. there is no way around it, i'd say you've just reached an optimum stage where all the SAT techniques/shortcuts are no good, and good ole hard work is ("all") what you need to overcome your problem.</p>
<p>take the advice of those above and get a "common SAT" vocab list and memorize. and there is still no guarantee. good luck</p>
<p>I discourage using those vocab word lists. To me it's a waste of time - I didn't really read too many books in high school (spent most of my time editing Wikipedia :)), didn't use those vocab lists, but I just did a lot of practice tests and got a 770 on the verbal section... it helps if you take AP English Language or Literature, because you have to read a lot of difficult books and poetry and that really helps your vocab. To be honest, you would have to do a lot of studying and memorization to significantly increase your score on the verbal SAT (and even then, you're depending on luck - what words will appear on the actual test?) - in that same amount of time, you could probably read 10 classics and raise your score by the same amount, except it's less boring and more generally enriching :)</p>
<p>hey, guys? my problem is that i don't know words which you may call simple. (i'm non-native). then even if i want to read books or magazines, i'm facing great vocab. so do i have to build some basic vocab before i start preparing like native ones??</p>
<p>Tsenguun--- I'm totally with u. I'm non native also and I've been thinking and asking people whether I should learn the basic vocab first or the harder ones. and it's just so hard to look up unfamiliar words like every 10 seconds, it gets annoying, then I stop reading...</p>
<p>on the PSAT I didn't know any of the words, so i guessed, and my scores were really low. on the last SAT I took, also the 1st one...I just pretty much skipped all the sentence completion, becuz I dont' know any of the words!! I jumped ahead to the reading....my score was like 120 points higher..but still very low!</p>
<p>ps. BobbyPires----- If I memorize all the common SAT words, am I going to be fine on the sentence completion? I need to raise my cr score like umm at least 150 points</p>
<p>I completely disagree with the assertion that memorizing vocab words is useless!
I read 2 books designed to improve SAT vocabulary, and I've seen a great improvement in my scores on the sentence completion section!
The chance that a word you've learned is the correct answer may be slim, BUT the chance that the same word is one of the wrong choices is actually pretty high! Being able to ELIMINATE a WRONG answer is just as important as being able to identify the correct one. There have been times where I knew the definitions of the 4 wrong answers which allowed me to choose the correct one without actually knowing what it meant.</p>
<p>Conclusion: Do whatever you can to improve your vocab. Read, memorize words from a list, etc.
The more you do, the higher your SAT score will be.</p>
<p>^ You read, I believe his assertion was that you shouldn't study a list of words and definitions. He also agreed that you should read a book over a list.</p>
<p>hi there
i'm a non-native speaker as well, and at first I had a difficult time with sentence completion questions. But now I've been getting almost all of them right. This is what I did:</p>
<p>Firstly, I don't personally believe in memorizing words and definitions because for me, things just don't work that way. So instead of just memorizing gazillion sets of words, I just used Princeton's word group list(it's the last edition) which helped me immensely. I don't necessarily know if this will help you though because of different learning styles and whatnot, but as for me, it worked because even if you didn't know the exact definition for say, "inconsequential", you would at least know that it means something along the lines of "small", because it's under the category of smallness. In fact, inconsequential means "unimportant", so if that was on the test, you would at least be able to eliminate an answer or two. I agree with some people here that you never know what you will get on the day of the test, but for some reason I'm inclined to think that the ETS likes to reuse the same sets of words that have appeared on the previous sat's. So having said that, if you just memorize the words that are most likely to be on the SAT, then you're probably all set. However, don't stop reading though- you need to keep reading for the reading comprehension section- and THAT's what I find the most difficult, most challenging part of the test.</p>